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SCANNING FOSSILS: A team works to make digital scans of ancient whale bones.
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Whale Detective
Nick Pyenson investigates whale bones to solve age-old mysteries about these gigantic sea creatures
A warehouse in a suburb outside of Washington, D.C., may look unremarkable from the outside. But inside, it’s packed with massive bones and preserved fossil remains. They belong to whales—the biggest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. It’s Nick Pyenson’s job to oversee this collection of giants.
Pyenson is a paleontologist—a scientist who studies ancient life on Earth—and the curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s collection of marine mammal fossils. It’s the largest collection of whale bones and whale fossils in the world. He uses the collection to investigate an age-old mystery: how whales have evolved, or changed over time. Pyenson spoke with Science World about the secrets these ancient remains are revealing.
FIELDWORK: Pyenson holds a fossil in Canada.
How did you end up working with the Smithsonian’s marine mammal collection?
As a college student, I worked on a project studying the evolution of whale brains by examining fossilized whale skulls at the Smithsonian. I realized that whales were an exciting and understudied group of animals in evolutionary history. Now I’m the curator of the collection I worked on as an undergraduate.
Why are whales important animals to study?
Whales have changed tremendously over time. The first whale-type creature was a 1.75 meter (6 foot)-long, four-legged animal that lived on land millions of years ago. Over time, that species evolved into the mighty ocean-dwellers we know today. Understanding how these dramatic changes occurred tells us about how evolution works.
What discoveries have you made about whales?
SEA UNICORN: These are the tusks of a narwhal, a type of porpoise.
We’re starting to understand how whales got so big. By studying the fossil record, we found that they became so large only relatively recently. This shift coincided with an ice age about 3 million years ago. This colder period altered the temperatures of the oceans, which affected how the waters circulated. Shifting currents concentrated fish and other small marine animals into large patches. Bigger whales had more success moving between these pockets of dense but spaced-out prey and therefore reproduced more often. That led to the evolution of larger whales.
This study holds valuable clues to life on Earth today. The planet’s climate is warming and changing faster than ever before. The best way to understand how life on Earth will adapt is to investigate times of change in the past. Only then can we have a better idea of what might happen to life on Earth.
DIGITAL DOLPHIN: The Smithsonian posts 3-D scans of its fossil collection online.
What are you working on now?
BIG SKULL: Pyenson poses with the skull of an ancient blue whale.
One of the coolest ongoing projects I’m working on is digitizing the Smithsonian’s collection. We are using specialized scanners to make digital models of our marine mammal fossils so we can preserve and share them with the world. It’s a lot of work—if I were to scan one fossil per minute, it would take me 2,000 years to get to every specimen. Not to mention that some of our fossils are as big as a truck! So we’re picking the most interesting fossils first and starting from there. We put all of our scans online so researchers, students, and curious people around the world can get started on answering the next great question.
What do you like most about your job?
I get to ask important questions about life and try to answer them. What makes paleontology so great is being able to actually hold those answers in your hand. To me, handling ancient fossils is like traveling through time.